First thought on ISO/TR 8344:2024 - Issues and considerations for managing records in structured data environments.

Generally, I'm very pleased to see ISO making headway on topics that we are all struggling with, but my first reaction to TR8344 is confusion.

I've found a point of real concern without even getting past the index. This creates a real problem for me around how much credibility I should give the rest of the document.

Section 5.9 is titled 'Disposition of individual records is not feasible,' a statement I think that is flat out wrong (please correct me if you disagree).

While the section itself goes on to describe some real challenges with structured data, I can't get away from the fact that the title makes an obviously erroneous statement.

If the section title said 'difficult,' 'complicated,' 'conceptually different' - or something other than 'not feasible' - I'd be 100% behind it. ‘Not feasible’ though, is wrong - and we have ample evidence for this.

For starters, EDRMS are structured data systems.

And they were designed to destroy records.

They have exactly the same conceptual challenges for what a record is that any other structured data system has - shared entities, key values, referential integrity, data that is related to data in other tables and places (including the objects - also data).

And EDRMS make disposition work - because the application is designed to do that.

And EDRMS isn’t alone.

In my experience. almost very application has a deletion routine which is designed to both protect the database (referential integrity etc.) and also let you destroy things. While we often get in the way of that with replication, bad design doesn’t make something not feasible - it makes it difficult, but if this were an easy problem, people wouldn’t be trying to pay us to solve it.

Here is a video of the Hubspot destruction routine - showing that destruction (as one form of disposition) is not just feasible, but trivially easy because it has been designed into the application.

So I have to ask, am I tragically ill informed and just wrong about this?

Have I missed a nuance?

Or does this section quite urgently need re-titling before people in the community read it and act as though the statement it makes is true?